EVALUATION

pictures for cd

Here are two images we used for the actual cd itself.

This is the inside of our cd cover. We edited the pictures on the left by making them into polariods. 

final website design

This is our website finished. As you can see we stuck to the vibrant colours and the use of imagery surrounding the title. We added writing and information to show that the website is social and connects with the audience.

Final Draft - Music Video

This is the final production of our music video, as of the problems we faced with actors and weather this video only took us a week to shoot and edit, obviously this is something we weren't pleased with to be doing but we feel we did a good job taking into account the circumstances. 

Website Video - Fun Video

This is a short stop/start animation video produced for our website as an extra. As on Ke$has website we found she had quiet a few random videos. We added one of her other songs to it as the beat went in time to the movements. We used toy dinosaurs as a fun element to it and because our song we originally focussed on was 'Dinosaur'.

We did the stop/start animation by filming a dinosaur in one position for about 2/3 seconds, we then stopped filming, moved them along a bit more and filmed again. We then edited this with about 5 frames from each clip and put them together. From this it looks like the dinosaurs are moving across the scene. We also did this with the dinosaurs going up and down.

Album Inspiration

For our half term homework, we was set to go re-search albums and websites of artists which inspired us or who are in the same genre of music with the artist we are doing. For this, we went to HMV when we met and looked at CD's and took photo's (with the stores premisson). We have allready posted the Kesha CD in much detail, this is because she is the artist we are doing, we can then interpret this into developing our own CD. This post is for rest of the CD's.

Lady Gaga.
Lady Gaga is one of the major pop stars at the current time and with this alone we thought was a 100% look at.

This is the cover and the back of Lady Gaga's first album 'The Fame'. Again like the Kesha album, we can see the front cover is a close up of the artists face. This is to represent the artist but to also get the face and image out to the public, this is something which we have picked up on and may use. This is very generic for the pop genre. It focuses on the artists image, something which most pop stars do these days. The mise en scene with the black background contrasting with her pale face and white hair again draw the attention back to her.

The back of the album does exactly the same thing as the front. It draws to the image of the artists as being crazy and wacky, something which she is. We have also noticed that the name is on the front AND back of the album, she is promoting herself majorly, getting her name out. This is something which we are going to use on our CD cover.

 This is the inside of the CD and the inside of the booklet. The inside of the cover again is promoting her and her image. However what is different is the CD itself, it is very plain and almost dull, this is a contrast to the rest of the CD. We think this is because not many people see the CD itself cause they are listening to the songs on the stereo. This is something we have picked up on and will use towards the making of our CD.
The booklet again is very self promoting, while also catching the audiences eye. This is something we need to pick up, since when asking a few people we know, not many people even look in the booklet when buying a CD. We are deciding to make our booklet eye catching so that they will pick it up and look inside it.

Rihanna
Rihanna is a well known figure in the music industry. She makes similar, but totally different songs to kesha, this is a reason why we choose to look at her.

 

Like above, this is the front and back of the CD. Just like any other pop CD, the front cover is a close up of the artist. Again this is to support there individual image of this artists. It also self promotes the artist and their songs. We can also see that on the cover they are promoting what songs are on the album, this is unusual since many pop stars don't do this. We also see that they is no emphasis on Rihanna's name. They are expecting people to know who she already is, this is totally different compared to Lady Gaga's album, the emphasis is all on her name. The black and white effect works well on this CD cover.
However the back is very generic of a pop CD, this is because they is a long shot of the artist. This is to promote the artists image. It is also to lead the audience into buying the CD. For example, Rihanna isn't fully facing us, only her head in, this will intrigue the artist since it represents her songs and therefore they will buy it.

However, the two images (front and back) and very different, one is very in your face upfront, her eyes look like there staring at you, whereas the other is very tempting and secret.

 

This is the inside of the CD and the inside of the booklet. The first thing which i find interesting about this is that all the images are different, unlike lady gaga where she uses the cover of her booklet and the back of the CD the same image. The Cover of the booklet is very interesting. The negative technique is used here, it's used very effectively. Again the CD is very plain with only a 'R' on it. This is to draw attention to the image of the artist rather than the image of the product itself. This is something we are on about using.
Inside the booklet is very different, it's very image based whereas Lady Gaga's booklet is very lyric and text based. This again is effective since it draws the reader back to the image of the artists, while also giving information about the lyrics.

Kate Nash

Kate Nash is a very popular artist within the target age group which we are aiming for. This is the reason why we decided to look at her.

 

Like the others, this is the back and front of the CD cover. Also like the others we see that the artists is on the front of the CD. This again is self promotion. We can see that the most striking thing on the CD cover is the name 'Kate Nash' The text stands out because of its difference in looking like its been written, we could include this kind of text on our cd cover. Kate nash has a very simple looking cd cover and has a picture of her on it. Her picture relates to the type of music she creates as it is very child like, as though shes talking through her songs instead of singing. She is a more classy artist compared to Ke$ha because Ke$ha is more of a party girl in her videos. The layout of the songs on the back cover is abit mish mash as they are arranged sid by side and numbered.

Another Digipak we looked at was Ellie Gouldings' album 'Lights'. We chose to look at this artist because she aims at the same target audience as Ke$ha although her music genre of Indie-Pop is slightly different to that of Ke$ha and this is reflected in the Digipak.

The front and back covers of the Digipak are both quite appropriate to an indie genre as they  are both quite simple in layout and fonts etc. Although there are features on the front and back covers appropriate to the pop genre. These features include a close up of the artist as the dominant image covering the front cover as they are the main focus. Other features include the use of glitter and colours such as gold contrasted on a plain black background; this is similar to our artist Ke$ha's colour scheme on her album.

The mise-en-scene of the front and back covers is very minimal. With no setting, little lighting and no costume visible. The use of having no setting emphasises the importance of the artist and her music opposed to any props or gimmicks. There is some lighting on the front cover of the CD by use of the dark black background and some lighting on the artist's face to make her stand out on the cover and be the main attraction. In terms of costume, no particular outfit is visible apart from the strap of a black top visible which once more adds to the effect of making the artists face stand out from everything else on the cover. The artists hair is a major feature of the CD cover with it being loosely curled to connotate innocence with glitter and bright lighting highlighting points on her hair and face, which contains little makeup to make her appear natural and pure to her audience. 

The layout on this front and back cover is the most simple layout of all the digipak's we researched. This is highly effective upon the artist's audience as it portrays a persona of her music being the main focus rather than props or effects. The back cover also has a plain black background to help the font stand out and catch peoples eyes. The font on the front and back covers is gold to stand out against the plain black background. It is also in a simple bold font for emphasis. The main font on the front cover saying the artist's name and album name also has an effect of the titles themselves being lights to parallel the album name.

The dominant image and simple style help sell the artist as serious about their music though the use of glitter also reflects the artist having a fun side to her personality.


(Same as the website we saved this as a draft before publishing it)

Media advanced portfolio critical evaluation

Media-Advanced portfolio Critical Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

    We have stuck to certain conventions that relate to our pop genre. We have done this by using a young female to play the main role of the artist in our video and included dance shots every so often to fit in with the rhythm of the music and to show the idealistic themes of our genre. However we wanted to include an old man in our video, as this character would relate well to the story of the song. We realised through feedback from classmates that an old person in a pop video might not appeal to that genres audience. To make this more comical and attract more to the audience, we used a young male and dressed him up as an old man, the humorous side of this is that you can tell he is not actually an old man. Pop Music videos consist of short shots to make it quick and sharp (this is mainly because pop music is fast and therefore needs the video to flow to the beat of the music). I think making the shots last at least 3-5 seconds was one of our main priorities we tried to achieve and creating the mixed scenes flow from one shot to another.

We have incorporated many different aspects of postmodern ideas that generate a certain challenge of technicalities and performance that other music videos contain. These include things like bright colours, make-up, props, split screen effect and light changes (e.g. colour gels over lights whilst filmed or edit the lighting colour on the Mac). Make-up needed to be a key element in our video. Ke$ha and most current artists such as Lady Gaga take dramatic changes to the way they look with make-up whilst being filmed and to when they are just socializing. I found that the main feature that is used for the make-up is glitter. Glitter is stereotypical for sparkling and giving a ‘fun’ vibe, and so glitter was used on the face.

When we researched Ke$ha we found that on her website the text used was in a graffiti looking kind of font which stands out as being bright and urban. Therefore we took this onboard and decided to make our own font by handwriting, scanning it onto a Mac and carefully editing it on Photoshop to recreate the style of Ke$ha’s. The text was then able to stand out on our website and CD cover and relate to the genre we followed.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

We have maintained a clear image and theme throughout our campaign by the consistency of colours used for example and the way they link to the genre type, we used bright colours such as pink within our music video and on our website to reflect the pop style and image we wished to portray of a fun, girly female. Our theme and song title reflect fun and flirtation, we demonstrate this theme throughout our video, website and CD cover seen in the images such as sequins and our character blowing kisses. Costume is also used consistently portraying a party like look, seen in all our interrelated related products. They are related by the joint purpose of wanting to sell our artist and portray her attitude in a positive way, this is seen by close ups and dancing in our video for example and the animation on the website. They target the audience by showing our artists fun personality and likability, a very important factor desired when making our products to sell our artist. Shots seen in the video of her laughing and dancing emphasise this likability factor and this relationship and link between all our products help reflect the personality of our character. The relationship between our products is very consistent using the same fonts and colours for example, aspects of these are our house style within our products and are used consistently to represent and be associated with our artist. Miming to the camera seen in our video also helps target the audience and establish a pseudo friendship with them and helps them feel involved.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We gathered audience feedback in many ways. One way was throughout the process of editing. We got other groups to come and watch our video and then give us written feedback., through this we was able to improve our editing for the rest of the video. We also posted the video on youtube then asked close friends and family to watch the video and then give feedback, either over the internet or face to face.
We would say that after the feedback during the production process helped us get a perspective of what the target audience liked about the video so far. For example on group said that one of the beginning shots was too long and boring and didn’t go quite well with the other fast short snappy shots that we used around it. With this in mind we decided to use the spilt screen effect and the colour flash effect. This relates back to our target audience cause even though it’s still long, it’s still vibrant and still catches your eye. It goes well with the other clips around this one.
I would say that as a group we do agree with the feedback. Most of the feedback was positive, and then with the negative feedback, we fount that it was easy to take the feedback in and then deal with the problems. One of the problems I would say with this is that it’s only a handful of our target audience, we’re not getting a proper view of our audience feedback.

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

To create our production we made use of the equipment provided, including the film camera and the Apple Mac. The Apple Mac allowed us to use certain applications such as, imovie, iweb, Photoshop and the internet. The internet was used most of the time, whether we were looking at Ke$ha’s website for inspiration or just to blog, the internet most certainly helped us along the way with research. Photoshop is a great programme, there are so many different edits that can be made on an image. Once discovering all these possibilities of changing an image, you become more creative with the use of layers and filters.    

Online media technology has enabled us to get our project to a wider audience through many different ways. The first way is the blog, this as enabled us to update what we are doing with the music video on a regular basis. Another way is through youtube and facebook. We was upload the video on to youtube then post the link on our facebook pages. From this we was able to get the video to bigger range of our target audience.

We used technology throughout the whole process of our production and it helped us greatly. Firstly, it enabled us to research in depth into our artists existing videos, websites and CD covers to develop a sense of their styles and ideologies, with our artist Ke$ha, this involved fun and parties etc. We also used youtube to gather audience feedback which helped us greatly to look for improvements to be used, positive feedback was also used as well as constructive. We posted our split screen idea for example on our blog. The software such as imovie and photoshop has also helped improve our productions and come up with new ideas. Photoshop was particularly helpful as we discovered all the different edits and effects to help us and we got audience feedback from this to help us decide which if any edit was right for us and our production.

Website Analysis & Research

Aswell as researching and digipaks of artist's of a similar genre and target audience to our artist, we researched artist's websites. 
The first artist's website I analysed was Ke$ha's;


The logo within the website is the same as that on the CD cover and present the artist in the same way.  The font is sharply edged and includes a pound sign instead of an 'S'. It is also highly glittery, gold and presented at a tilted angle. All of these connotations from the logo present Ke$ha as edgy, glamourous and youthful. The image presented of Ke$ha herself in the left hand corner also portrays her this way and also as a wild partier with little worries. This connotation can be met by Ke$ha's costume, makeup, props and positioning in the image. More specifically, Ke$ha has long messy hair to represent the 'trashy chic' image she portrays, this is also present in her costume; little clothing in the form of a low cut top and shorts aswell as knee high animal print socks, this furthens to idea of her being wild and crazy. In this image Ke$ha has a prop of a flag which has multimedia effects on and is also holding a glass of beer, once more hightening her image of partying, youth and fun. 


Generic conventions of the music are used including colourful glittery images and the use of bright coloured links to stand out against the background. In addition to this stars and stripes are also used as borders on information boxes to reflect the idea of bold pop images and patriotism. All these features are seen in generic associations, examples of websites and digipaks of artists within the pop genre like our own.


The second artist's website we analysed was Kate Nash's;


The first screen you come across is just a photoshoped image of a group of birds together. With her name 'Kate Nash' under. This is self promotion as well as self promotion of one of her songs 'Birds'. This also relates to her wacky characteristics.


After clicking on this image it takes us to the main homepage. This seems very complex as well as very simple. The banner which goes from the top down the side is again of birds and her name. Again this is self promotion. The birds also represent her youth-ness. At first look its crazy and wild, complex. Something which represents the youth. The weird and wonderful pictures and videos on her website also represent her cause it shows the audience how Kate Nash is as a person and a singer. This is something that we hope to put across onto our website.


Generic conventions of her music can be seen. The simple black and white colours use her represent our simple but powerful her music is.


(Teachers; We saved these as drafts rather than posting like idiots, we did do them though)

cd cover- digipak

With the main female singer being a different person this meant we had to change the picture on our website and take a new picture for the cd cover. I took a picture of myself and edited it on photoshop so that it looked like i was blowing glitter.
We also then had to add this image onto the website where the old girl was.

change of plan

Over christmas we booked out equipment ready to film the last few parts of our video. However our main female was not able to do any of the days that we had left. This was a major worry of ours as we already had lots of footage of her in the shots. We tryed to think of other ways to work around her not being in the rest of the shots but the story would not have made sense. As we had little time and other girls we conntacted were not available, the only option was to use me or Adele to reshoot the whole thing.

We filmed over christmas on one day and managed to reshoot the whole of the house scene and the wood scene with me being the main female 'singer'. We felt more organised as we had already done most shots before and so we knew what position the camera had to be in. The first day back of college we re-filmed the white room scene and edited some of it that day too.

The next day Jordan found that our video had dissapeared. But we imported it again and edited more.